— NVDIA’s RTX 2070 follows on from their recent release of the 2080 and 2080 Ti from their RTX 2000 series of Turing architecture GPUs. The 2070 has 2304 CUDA cores, a base/boost clock of 1410/1620 MHz, 8GB of GDRR6 memory and a memory bandwidth of 448GB/s. Traditionally NVIDIA’s 70 range has offered better value for money than the more powerful 80 GPUs. The Founders Edition 2070 has an MSRP of $599 which makes both new 1080 and used 1080 Ti GPUs decent options. The price premium over the previous generation of GPUs is, for the most part, for NVIDIA’s new ray tracing technology, and unfortunately, the benefit of this is currently unknown as there are no RTX ready games. Performance benchmarks on tangibles place the 2070 6% ahead of the 1080 in terms of effective speed and 17% behind the 1080 Ti. Since AMD’s similarly priced RX Vega 64 has a 13% lower effective speed, there is no real pressure on NVIDIA to compete agressively with thier own previous generation of cards.

— NVIDIA's RTX 2080 is based on its new Turing architecture which boasts new AI and ray tracing technology that could eventually result in better GPU performance. Unfortunately there are currently no games which can take advantage of these new capabilities. The early 2080 benchmarks only exhibit a modest (20%) performance improvement over the 1080 which considering the new price tag of $800 for the Founders Edition is hard to stomach. The 2080 features 2944 CUDA cores, a base/boost speed of 1515/1710 MHz, 8 GB of GDDR6 memory and a memory bandwidth of 448 GB/s. NVIDIA have also released the 2080 Ti which has marginally higher specs together with a jaw dropping price tag of $1200 for the Founders Edition. Unfortunately for gamers and other consumers, AMD’s top end GPUs such as the Vega 64 still lag NVIDIA's previous flagship 1080 Ti by 30% so there is very little pressure on NVIDIA to offer better value for money. The 2080 only has 8GB of RAM which is fine today but will likely haunt any early adopters that plan to keep the card for more than two years.

— “Build it, and they will come” must be NVIDIA’s thinking behind their latest consumer-focused GPU: the RTX 2080 Ti, which has been released alongside the RTX 2080. Following on from the Pascal architecture of the 1080 series, the 2080 series is based on a new Turing GPU architecture which features Tensor cores for AI (thereby potentially reducing GPU usage during machine learning workloads) and RT cores for ray tracing (rendering more realistic images). Unfortunately, there aren’t (m)any games that make use of these capabilities so the $1200 price tag on the RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition is difficult to justify. On paper the 2080 Ti has 4352 CUDA cores, a base/boost clock of 1350/1545 MHz, 11GB of GDRR6 memory and a memory bandwidth of 616GB/s. The upshot is that it has around a 30% faster effective speed than the 1080 Ti, which at 18 months old continues to offer comparable value for money and currently dominates the high-end gaming market. Professional users such as game developers or 4K gamers may find value in the 2080 Ti but for typical users (@1080p), prices need to drop substantially before the 2080 Ti has much chance of widespread adoption.

— The GeForce GTX 1070 Ti is NVIDIA’s latest HD and VR ready, gaming GPU and is successor to the current number one GPU by market share, the GTX 1070. Like the 1070, the 1070 Ti is based on the16nm Pascal architecture and GP104 GPU. Both feature 8 GB of GDDR5 memory with a 256 bit memory interface producing a total memory bandwidth of 256 GB/s, and both have a rated boost clock speed of 1.683 GHz, although both are geared to be over clocked. In fact, the 1070 Ti is basically the 1070 but with 25% more working CUDA cores (2432 versus 1920) and slightly higher base clock of 1607MHz (versus 1506MHz in the 1070). This translates to the 1070 Ti being as nearly as powerful as the GTX 1080 which has 2560 CUDA cores, 8 GB of GDRR5X memory and boost clock of 1733 GHz. With founder’s editions available at $449, compared to $470 for AMD’s recent Vega based RX 56 and $510 for the GTX 1080, the 1070 Ti represents good value for money. The rumoured fast approaching release of Volta (NVIDIA’s next generation architecture following on from Pascal) in early 2018 may upset demand for the 1070 Ti.

— The Radeon RX Vega 56 is the weakest member of AMD's Vega GPU family. The Vega architecture is built on 14 nm silicon and contains next-generation compute units (nCUs). Each NCU houses 64 steam processors, of which the Vega 56 has 3584 vs. 4096 in the Vega 64. The new architecture employs 8GB of second generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM2) which is able cope with more data, more quickly than previously. Although the Vega 56 has 12.5% less processing units, users have found that by flashing an RX 64 Bios into an RX 56 card allows a 10% increase in OC headroom which effectively brings a BIOS flashed RX 56 onto par with a stock RX 64 and just 12.5% slower than a fully overclocked RX 64. This would be great news if the RX 56 were available at its MSRP of $399 as it would then be both cheaper and faster than a GTX 1070, but current market prices for the RX Vega 56 are closer to $550. The GPU market is still unbalanced (AMD GPUs in particular) as a result of the ongoing Ethereum mining frenzy which has depleted global GPU inventory to the lowest levels in recent memory.

— The Radeon RX Vega 64 is AMD’s latest Radeon flagship graphics card. It is the first Vega based gaming GPU and follows on from the recent launch of the Vega Frontier Edition. The Vega architecture is built on 14 nm silicon and contains next-generation compute units (nCUs) that have been engineered to be more efficient and powerful than ever before, enabling gamers to achieve higher frame rates at 4K. Each NCU houses 64 steam processors, of which the Vega 64 has 4096 (compared to 3584 in the Vega 56) which can process up to 13.7 TFLOPS (0.6 TFLOPS more than the Frontier Edition) in the liquid cooled version of the GPU. The new architecture also employs 8GB of second generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM2) which is able cope with more data, more quickly than previously. AMD describe this as the most significant leap in their GPU architecture for the last five years. Our graphics benchmarks place the performance of the Vega 64 amongst the best. Its effective speed is very close to that of the twice as expensive Frontier Edition (a workstation GPU with a gaming mode) and just behind NVIDIA’s similarly priced, but now 1 year old GTX 1080. Despite the hopes of AMD enthusiasts, the great performance from the Vega 64 has not been able to exceed the even greater performance from NVIDIA’s GTX 1080 Ti, released earlier this year. The 33% faster 1080 Ti offers better value for money than an RX 64 would even if it were available at its list price of $599. The best prices for RX 64's today are closer to $750 making the RX 64 somewhat redundant until prices drop down to the low $500 mark.

— The Radeon Vega Frontier Edition GPU is AMD's first graphics card with the new Vega architecture which features next-generation compute units (nCUs). AMD have designed Vega to handle the increasing data and computational demands from game creation to rendering simulations to video processing to AI. The Radeon Vega Frontier Edition comes with 64 nCUs yielding 4096 stream processors with which it can process up to 13.1 TFLOPS. Also, it has a high-bandwidth cache controller and 16GB of ultra fast HBM2 RAM and supports an 8K display. This first Vega GPU is aimed at professional workstation users and although it is not a gaming card, its game performance benchmarks are underwhelming albeit good. It broadly matches the performance of NVIDIA's now year old GTX 1080, but at nearly twice the price ($550 for the 1080 versus a list price of $1000 for the air-cooled Vega Frontier Edition). There is also a water-cooled edition of the Vega Frontier which commands an additional $500 premium on the list price. There will be gaming variants of Vega based cards available shortly and, depending on their entry price, these may prove to be more interesting to the consumer/gamer market.

— The Radeon RX 560 is third in the line up of AMD’s second generation Polaris GPUs aimed at the entry-level 1080p gaming market with a sub-$100 launch price, due for release in May 2017. It is the successor to the now nine month old RX 460. Like the RX 460, it is based on Polaris 11, but comes with all 16 compute units enabled (2 more than in the 460). Coupled with a 6% improvement in boost clock speed from 1200MHz to 1275MHz, a minimum increase in overall effective speed of 10% against the 460 is anticipated. The RX 560 is fresh competition to NVIDIA’s GTX 1050 in terms of price and performance. User benchmarks reveal that NVIDIA’s GTX 1050 is faster than the RX 460 by 17% and so it is expected that the 560 will close most, if not all, of that gap.

— Hot on the heels of the release of the Radeon RX 580 and RX 570 launched earlier this week, AMD have released a new Polaris 12 GPU, the Radeon RX 550. It is a sub-$100 entry level GPU, targeted at those who want an inexpensive, low profile, low power and low performance component for mini desktop PCs or a minor upgrade on integrated GPUs. It has just 8 compute units, a boost clock of 1183 MHz and comes with either 2 or 4 Gb of GDDR5 memory capable of delivering up to 112 GB/s bandwidth. As expected from a discrete GPU, the RX 550 wipes the floor with Intel’s current best desktop iGPU (HD 630 (Kaby Lake). The RX 550 is expected to be around 70% as fast as the only $20 dearer RX 560 (the successor to the RX 460 to be released next month), however this should be sufficient for an okay gaming experience for many games on non-demanding settings. It is anticipated, that AMD will tailor the form of the 550 more towards the laptop market as the year progresses.